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thanks, so the answer is, get an electrician? i was worried itd be too small a job for anyone to bother
rogan-
thanks, so the answer is, get an electrician?
Yes
i was worried itd be too small a job for anyone to bother
Rewiring your lighting circuits with earthed cable may be a much bigger job than you expect. Doing a small 3 bedroom house took me and another guy 2 and a half days to do it, and we were lucky that we were able to pull most of the new cables in place when we pulled the old cables out and only had to chase one wall out.
Depending on the layout of the house, generally floorboards will need to come up and chases put in the walls to get new cables in. If your house is finished (ie not currently being renovated) it can be quite an involved process that requires an amount of redecorating afterwards.
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, so the answer is, get an electrician?
I didn’t do this. Nobody has died.
Get some connectors, watch a load of YouTube videos, get the tools you need to be absolutely certain you’ve turned off the juice to it and DIY it.
If it’s not earthed just make sure you get class ii fittings.
Nef
Howard
You don't.
For a start, the original fitting has 3 live termials - Loop, Live and neutral, and an earthing point, but your new accessory only has terminals for live, neutral and earth (the loop is used so that you can take a cable with mains power to the light without powering the light itself, and then take that power to a switch and back, and then to the light itself).
As has been pointed out, the old wiring is 2 core cable that is just live and neutral without an earth (CPC) so it would be dangerous to use a metal fitting as it may became live in fault condition (live or neutral conductor touching the case). I've literally just spent the last week updating a property so that their lighting wiring has an earth, as they wanted to use metal faceplate light switches and metal light fittings.
Pictured below is an example of the bodge that we found. There is no earth at the switch, but for some reason they've put an earth link between back box and faceplate - which is worth fuck all if there isn't an actual earth connection there.